Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY German Robotics Conference: 13–15 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY European Robotics Forum: 25–27 March 2025, STUTTGART, GERMANY RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDON IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN 2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON, TX RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL Enjoy today’s videos! Last year, we unveiled the new Atlas—faster, stronger, more compact, and less messy. We’re designing the world’s most dynamic humanoid robot to do anything and everything, but we get there one step at a time. Our first task is part sequencing, a common logistics task in automotive manufacturing. Discover why we started with sequencing, how we are solving hard problems, and how we’re delivering a humanoid robot with real value. My favorite part is 1:40, where Atlas squats down to pick a part up off the ground. [ Boston Dynamics ] I’m mostly impressed that making contact with that stick doesn’t cause the robot to fall over. [ Unitree ] Professor Patrícia Alves-Oliveira is studying authenticity of artworks co-created by an artist and a robot. Her research lab, Robot Studio, is developing methods to authenticate artwork by analyzing their entire creative process. This is accomplished by using the artist’s biometrics as well as the process of artwork creation, from the first brushstroke to the final painting. This work aims to bring ownership back to artists in the age of generative AI. [ Robot Studio ] at [ University of Michigan ] Hard to believe that RoMeLa has been developing humanoid robots for 20 (!) years. Here’s to 20 more! [ RoMeLa ] at [ University of California Los Angeles ] In this demo, Reachy 2 autonomously sorts healthy and unhealthy foods. No machine learning, no pre-trained AI—just real-time object detection! [ Pollen ] Biological snakes achieve high mobility with numerous joints, inspiring snake-like robots for rescue and inspection. However, conventional designs feature a limited number of joints. This paper presents an underactuated snake robot consisting of many passive links that can dynamically change its joint coupling configuration by repositioning motor-driven joint units along internal rack gears. Furthermore, a soft robot skin wirelessly powers the units, eliminating wire tangling and disconnection risks. [ Paper ] Thanks, Ayato! Tech United Eindhoven is working on quadrupedal soccer robots, which should be fun. [ Tech United ] Autonomous manipulation in everyday tasks requires flexible action generation to handle complex, diverse real-world environments, such as objects with varying hardness and softness. Imitation Learning (IL) enables robots to learn complex tasks from expert demonstrations. However, a lot of existing methods rely on position/unilateral control, leaving challenges in tasks that require force information/control, like carefully grasping fragile or varying-hardness objects. To address these challenges, we introduce Bilateral Control-Based Imitation Learning via Action Chunking with Transformers(Bi-ACT) and”A” “L”ow-cost “P”hysical “Ha”rdware Considering Diverse Motor Control Modes for Research in Everyday Bimanual Robotic Manipulation (ALPHA-α). [ Alpha-Biact ] Thanks, Masato! Powered by UBTECH’s revolutionary framework “BrainNet”, a team of Walker S1 humanoid robots work together to master complex tasks at Zeekr’s Smart Factory! Teamwork makes the dream of robots work. [ UBTECH ] Personal mobile robotic assistants are expected to find wide applications in industry and healthcare. However, manually steering a robot while in motion requires significant concentration from the operator, especially in tight or crowded spaces. This work presents a virtual leash with which a robot can naturally follow an operator. We successfully validate on the ANYmal platform the robustness and performance of our entire pipeline in real-world experiments. [ ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab ] I do not ever want to inspect a wind turbine blade from the inside. [ Flyability ] Sometimes you can learn more about a robot from an instructional unboxing video than from a fancy demo. [ DEEP Robotics ] Researchers at Penn Engineering have discovered that certain features of AI-governed robots carry security vulnerabilities and weaknesses that were previously unidentified and unknown. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Laboratory, the research aims to address the emerging vulnerability for ensuring the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs) in robotics. [ RoboPAIR ] ReachBot is a joint project between Stanford and NASA to explore a new approach to mobility in challenging environments such as martian caves. It consists of a compact robot body with very long extending arms, based on booms used for extendable antennas. The booms unroll from a coil and can extend many meters in low gravity. In this talk I will introduce the ReachBot design and motion planning considerations, report on a field test with a single ReachBot arm in a lava tube in the Mojave Desert, and discuss future plans, which include the possibility of mounting one or more ReachBot arms equipped with wrists and grippers on a mobile platform – such as ANYMal. [ ReachBot ]

Although they’re a staple of sci-fi movies and conspiracy theories, in real life, tiny flying microbots—weighed down by batteries and electronics—have struggled to get very far. But a new combination of circuits and lightweight solid-state batteries called a “flying batteries” topology could let these bots really take off, potentially powering microbots for hours from a system that weighs milligrams. Microbots could be an important technology to find people buried in rubble or scout ahead in other dangerous situations. But they’re a difficult engineering challenge, says Patrick Mercier, an electrical and computer engineering professor at University of California San Diego. Mercier’s student Zixiao Lin described the new circuit last month at IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). “You have these really tiny robots, and you want them to last as long as possible in the field,” Mercier says. “The best way to do that is to use lithium-ion batteries, because they have the best energy density. But there’s this fundamental problem, where the actuators need much higher voltage than what the battery is capable of providing.” A lithium cell can provide about 4 volts, but piezoelectric actuators for microbots need tens to hundreds of volts, explains Mercier. Researchers, including Mercier’s own group, have developed circuits such as boost converters to pump up the voltage. But because they need relatively large inductors or a bunch of capacitors, these add too much mass and volume, typically taking up about as much room as the battery itself. A new kind of solid-state battery, developed at the French national electronics laboratory CEA-Leti, offered a potential solution. The batteries are a thin-film stack of material, including lithium cobalt oxide and lithium phosphorus oxynitride, made using semiconductor processing technology, and they can be diced up into tiny cells. A 0.33-cubic-millimeter, 0.8-milligram cell can store 20 microampere-hours of charge, or about 60 ampere-hours per liter. (Lithium-ion earbud batteries provide more than 100 A-h/L, but are about 1000 times as large.) A CEA-Leti spinoff based on the technology, Inject Power, in Grenoble, France, is gearing up to begin volume manufacturing in late 2026. Stacking Batteries on the Fly The solid-state battery’s ability to be diced up into tiny cells suggested that researchers could achieve high-voltages using a circuit that needs no capacitors or inductors. Instead, the circuit actively rearranges the connections among many tiny batteries moving them from parallel to serial and back again. Imagine a microdrone that moves by flapping wings attached to a piezoelectric actuator. On its circuit board are a dozen or so of the solid-state microbatteries. Each battery is part of a circuit consisting of four transistors. These act as switches that can dynamically change the connection to that battery’s neighbor so that it is either parallel, so they share the same voltage, or serial, so their voltages are added. At the start, all the batteries are in parallel, delivering a voltage that is nowhere near enough to trigger the actuator. The 2-mm2 IC the UCSD team built then begins opening and closing the transistor switches. This rearranges the connections between the cells so that first two cells are connected serially, then three, then four, and so on. In a few hundredths of a second, the batteries are all connected in series, and the voltage has piled so much charge onto the actuator that it snaps the microbot’s wings down. The IC then unwinds the process, making the batteries parallel again, one at a time. The integrated circuit in the “flying battery” has a total area of 2 square millimeters.Patrick Mercier Adiabatic Charging Why not just connect every battery in series at once instead of going through this ramping up and down scheme? In a word, efficiency. As long as the battery serialization and parallelization is done at a low-enough frequency, the system is charging adiabatically. That is, its power losses are minimized. But it’s what happens after the actuator triggers “where the real magic comes in,” says Mercier. The piezoelectric actuator in the circuit acts like a capacitor, storing energy. “Just like you have regenerative breaking in a car, we can recover some of the energy that we stored in this actuator.” As each battery is unstacked, the remaining energy storage system has a lower voltage than the actuator, so some charge flows back into the batteries. The UCSD team actually tested two varieties of solid-state microbatteries—1.5-volt ceramic version from Tokyo-based TDK (CeraCharge 1704-SSB) and a 4-volt custom design from CEA-Leti. With 1.6 grams of TDK cells, the circuit reached 56.1 volts and delivered a power density of 79 milliwatts per gram, but with 0.014 grams of the custom storage, it maxed out at 68 volts, and demonstrated a power density of 4,500 mW/g. Mercier plans to test the system with robotics partners while his team and CEA-Leti work to improved the flying batteries system’s packaging, miniaturization, and other properties. One important characteristic that needs work is the internal resistance of the microbatteries. “The challenge there is that the more you stack, the higher the series resistance is, and therefore the lower the frequency we can operate the system,” he says. Nevertheless, Mercier seems bullish on flying batteries’ chances of keeping microbots aloft. “Adiabatic charging with charge recovery and no passives: Those are two wins that help increase flight time.”

Salto has been one of our favorite robots since we were first introduced to it in 2016 as a project out of Ron Fearing’s lab at UC Berkeley. The palm-sized spring-loaded jumping robot has gone from barely being able to chain together a few open-loop jumps to mastering landings, bouncing around outside, powering through obstacle courses, and occasionally exploding. What’s quite unusual about Salto is that it’s still an active research project—nine years is an astonishingly long life time for any robot, especially one without any immediately obvious practical applications. But one of Salto’s original creators, Justin Yim (who is now a professor at the University of Illinois), has found a niche where Salto might be able to do what no other robot can: mid-air sampling of the water geysering out of the frigid surface of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. What makes Enceladus so interesting is that it’s completely covered in a 40 kilometer thick sheet of ice, and underneath that ice is a 10 km-deep global ocean. And within that ocean can be found—we know not what. Diving in that buried ocean is a problem that robots may be able to solve at some point, but in the near(er) term, Enceladus’ south pole is home to over a hundred cryovolcanoes that spew plumes of water vapor and all kinds of other stuff right out into space, offering a sampling opportunity to any robot that can get close enough for a sip. “We can cover large distances, we can get over obstacles, we don’t require an atmosphere, and we don’t pollute anything.” —Justin Yim, University of Illinois Yim, along with another Salto veteran Ethan Schaler (now at JPL), have been awarded funding through NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to turn Salto into a robot that can perform “Legged Exploration Across the Plume,” or in an only moderately strained backronym, LEAP. LEAP would be a space-ified version of Salto with a couple of major modifications allowing it to operate in a freezing, airless, low-gravity environment. Exploring Enceladus’ Challenging Terrain As best as we can make out from images taken during Cassini flybys, the surface of Enceladus is unfriendly to traditional rovers, covered in ridges and fissures, although we don’t have very much information on the exact properties of the terrain. There’s also essentially no atmosphere, meaning that you can’t fly using aerodynamics, and if you use rockets to fly instead, you run the risk of your exhaust contaminating any samples that you take. “This doesn’t leave us with a whole lot of options for getting around, but one that seems like it might be particularly suitable is jumping,” Yim tells us. “We can cover large distances, we can get over obstacles, we don’t require an atmosphere, and we don’t pollute anything.” And with Enceladus’ gravity being just 1/80th that of Earth, Salto’s meter-high jump on Earth would enable it to travel a hundred meters or so on Enceladus, taking samples as it soars through cryovolcano plumes. The current version of Salto does require an atmosphere, because it uses a pair of propellers as tiny thrusters to control yaw and roll. On LEAP, those thrusters would be replaced with an angled pair of reaction wheels instead. To deal with the terrain, the robot will also likely need a foot that can handle jumping from (and landing on) surfaces composed of granular ice particles. LEAP is designed to jump through Enceladus’ many plumes to collect samples, and use the moon’s terrain to direct subsequent jumps.NASA/Justin Yim While the vision is for LEAP to jump continuously, bouncing over the surface and through plumes in a controlled series of hops, sooner or later it’s going to have a bad landing, and the robot has to be prepared for that. “I think one of the biggest new technological developments is going to be multimodal locomotion,” explains Yim. “Specifically, we’d like to have a robust ability to handle falls.” The reaction wheels can help with this in two ways: they offer some protection by acting like a shell around the robot, and they can also operate as a regular pair of wheels, allowing the robot to roll around on the ground a little bit. “With some maneuvers that we’re experimenting with now, the reaction wheels might also be able to help the robot to pop itself back upright so that it can start jumping again after it falls over,” Yim says. A NIAC project like this is about as early-stage as it gets for something like LEAP, and an Enceladus mission is very far away as measured by almost every metric—space, time, funding, policy, you name it. Long term, the idea with LEAP is that it could be an add-on to a mission concept called the Enceladus Orbilander. This US $2.5 billion spacecraft would launch sometime in the 2030s, and spend about a dozen years getting to Saturn and entering orbit around Enceladus. After 1.5 years in orbit, the spacecraft would land on the surface, and spend a further 2 years looking for biosignatures. The Orbilander itself would be stationary, Yim explains, “so having this robotic mobility solution would be a great way to do expanded exploration of Enceladus, getting really long distance coverage to collect water samples from plumes on different areas of the surface.” LEAP has been funded through a nine-month Phase 1 study that begins this April. While the JPL team investigates ice-foot interactions and tries to figure out how to keep the robot from freezing to death, at the University of Illinois Yim will be upgrading Salto with self-righting capability. Honestly, it’s exciting to think that after so many years, Salto may have finally found an application where it offers the actual best solution for solving this particular problem of low-gravity mobility for science.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY German Robotics Conference: 13–15 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY European Robotics Forum: 25–27 March 2025, STUTTGART, GERMANY RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDON IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN 2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON, TX RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL Enjoy today’s videos! A bioinspired robot developed at EPFL can change shape to alter its own physical properties in response to its environment, resulting in a robust and efficient autonomous vehicle as well as a fresh approach to robotic locomotion. [ Science Robotics ] via [ EPFL ] A robot CAN get up this way, but SHOULD a robot get up this way? [ University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ] I’m impressed with the capabilities here, but not the use case. There are already automated systems that do this much faster, much more reliably, and almost certainly much more cheaply. So, probably best to think of this as more of a technology demo than anything with commercial potential. [ Figure ] NEO Gamma is the next generation of home humanoids designed and engineered by 1X Technologies. The Gamma series includes improvements across NEO’s hardware and AI, featuring a new design that is deeply considerate of life at home. The future of Home Humanoids is here. You all know by now not to take this video too seriously, but I will say that an advantage of building a robot like this for the home is that realistically it can spend most of its time sitting down and (presumably) charging. [ 1X Technologies ] This video compilation showcases novel aerial and underwater drone platforms and an ultra-quiet electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) propeller. These technologies were developed by the Advanced Vertical Flight Laboratory (AVFL) at Texas A&M University and Harmony Aeronautics, an AVFL spin-off company. [ AVFL ] Yes! More research like this please; legged robots (of all sizes) are TOO STOMPY. [ ETH Zurich ] Robosquirrel! [ BBC ] via [ Laughing Squid ] By watching their own motions with a camera, robots can teach themselves about the structure of their own bodies and how they move, a new study from researchers at Columbia Engineering now reveals. Equipped with this knowledge, the robots could not only plan their own actions, but also overcome damage to their bodies. [ Columbia University, School of Engineering and Applied Science ] If I was asking my robot to do a front flip for the first(ish) time, my face would probably look like the poor guy at 0:25. But it worked! [ EngineAI ] *We kindly request that all users refrain from making any dangerous modifications or using the robots in a hazardous manner. A hazardous manner? Like teaching it martial arts...? [ Unitree ] Explore SLAMSpoof—a cutting-edge project by Keio-CSG that demonstrates how LiDAR spoofing attacks can compromise SLAM systems. In this video, we explore how spoofing attacks can compromise the integrity of SLAM systems, review the underlying methodology, and discuss the potential security implications for robotics and autonomous navigation. Whether you’re a robotics enthusiast, a security researcher, or simply curious about emerging technologies, this video offers valuable insights into both the risks and the innovations in the field. [ SLAMSpoof ] Thanks, Kentaro! Sanctuary AI, a company developing physical AI for general purpose robots, announced the integration of new tactile sensor technology into its Phoenix general purpose robots. The integration enables teleoperation pilots to more effectively leverage the dexterity capabilities of general purpose robots to achieve complex, touch-driven tasks with precision and accuracy. [ Sanctuary AI ] I don’t know whether it’s the shape or the noise or what, but this robot pleases me. [ University of Pennsylvania, Sung Robotics Lab ] Check out the top features of the new Husky A300 - the next evolution of our rugged and customizable mobile robotic platform. Husky A300 offers superior performance, durability, and flexibility, empowering robotics researchers and innovators to tackle the most complex challenges in demanding environments. [ Clearpath Robotics ] The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover will drill deeper than any other mission has ever attempted on the Red Planet. Rosalind Franklin will be the first rover to reach a depth of up to two meters deep below the surface, acquiring samples that have been protected from harsh surface radiation and extreme temperatures. [ European Space Agency ] AI has been improving by leaps and bounds in recent years, and a string of new models can generate answers that almost feel as if they came from a person reasoning through a problem. But is AI actually close to reasoning like humans can? IBM distinguished scientist Murray Campbell chats with IBM Fellow Francesca Rossi about her time as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). They discuss the state of AI, what modern reasoning models are actually doing, and whether we’ll see models that reason like we do. [ IBM Research ]

Frustrated scientists turned to visual aids to help make their case for the lightning rod. The exploding thunder house is one example. When a small amount of gunpowder was deposited inside the dollhouse-size structure and a charge was applied, the house would either explode or not, depending on whether it was ungrounded or grounded. [For more on thunder houses, see “Tiny Exploding Houses Promoted 18th-Century Lightning Rods,.” IEEE Spectrum, 1 April 2023.] Three Experimental Illustrations of a General Law of Electrical Discharge made the case for Harris’s invention: a lightning rod for tall-masted wooden ships. The rod was attached to the mainmast, ran through the hull, and connected to copper sheeting on the underside of the ship, thus dissipating any electricity from a lightning strike into the sea. It was a great idea, and it seemed to work. So why did the British Navy refuse to adopt it? I’ll get to that in a bit. How to Illustrate the Principles of Lightning The “experimental illustrations” in Harris’s 16-page pamphlet were intended to be interactive, each one highlighting a specific principle of conductivity. The illustrations were plated with gold leaf to mimic the conducting path of lightning. When the reader applied a charge to one end, the current charred a black course along the page. In the illustration at top, someone has clearly done this on the right hand side. In the first experimental illustration in Harris’s book, the gold leaf is scattered haphazardly across the page. Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology The second experiment addresses a problem that was common in the days of tall ships: the rise and fall of the lightning rod as the jibs and rigging were adjusted according to the weather. Whereas a church steeple and its lightning rod remain fixed, a movable mast and the constantly changing rigging altered the configuration of the lightning rod. The experiment demonstrates that Harris’s design wasn’t affected by such changes. A charge wouldn’t dead-end and detonate midship just because a jib had been lowered. It would still follow the conductor that leads to the best exit for dissipation—that is, the ship’s bottom. The second experiment was intended to show, in a stylized way, the effect of the lightning rod rising and falling as the jibs and rigging were adjusted.Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology The experiment illustrates what would happen if the sailor were to accidentally come in contact with two points of a loose conductive cable during a lightning storm. Instead of following the cable, the discharge would course straight through him. As Harris wrote in the description, the poor seaman “would be probably destroyed.” Death was a clear risk for sailors on unprotected ships, just as it was for bell ringers in unprotected churches. Mr. Thunder-and-Lightning Harris William Snow Harris published Three Experimental Illustrations when he was about 70, and he died six years later. The booklet was his final salvo in a battle he had waged with the Royal Navy for decades. William Snow Harris (1791–1867) trained as a medical doctor but gave up his practice to focus on promoting his lightning rod for wooden ships. Plymouth Athenaeum An 1823 book on the effects of lightning on ships also featured his gold-leafed experimental illustrations, along with a vivid description of a lightning strike on an unprotected ship: “The main-top mast, from head to heel, was shivered into a thousand splinters….” Harris enlisted support for his system from leading scientists, such as Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone, and Humphry Davy. He eventually earned the nickname Mr. Thunder-and-Lightning Harris for his zealotry. Harris continued to press his case. A well-publicized lightning strike on the U.S. packet ship New York in 1827 helped. Three days into its transatlantic journey, lightning struck at dawn. The “electrical fluid,” as it was then called, ran down the mainmast, bursting three iron hoops and shattering the masthead and cap. It entered a storeroom and demolished the bulkheads and fittings before following a lead pipe into the ladies’ cabin and fragmenting a large mirror. Elsewhere, it overturned a piano, split the dining table into pieces, and magnetized the ship’s chronometer as well as most of the men’s watches. New York again. As the American Journal of Science and Arts reported, the chain was “literally torn to pieces and scattered to the winds,” but it did its job and saved the ship, and no passengers were killed. Beagle, which was about to set sail for a surveying trip of South America. After it returned five years later, one of its passengers, Charles Darwin, published an account that made the voyage famous. (His 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, was also based on his research aboard the Beagle.) The HMS Beagle, made famous by Charles Darwin, was one of 11 British navy ships to be outfitted with Harris’s fixed lightning rods. Bettmann/Getty Images described a strike that he witnessed while on deck: “The mainmast, for the instant, appeared to be a mass of fire, I felt certain that the lightning had passed down the conductor on that mast.” Thetis, whose foremast had been destroyed by lightning, so he was especially attuned to the destruction storms could cause. Yet on the Beagle, he wrote, “not the slightest ill consequence was experienced.” When Captain Robert FitzRoy made his report to the admiralty, he likewise endorsed Harris’s system: “Were I allowed to choose between masts so fitted and the contrary, I should decide in favor of those having Harris’s conductors.” Numbers Don’t Lie Not to be defeated, Harris turned to statistics, compiling a list of 235 British naval vessels damaged by lightning, from the Abercromby (26 October 1811, topmast shivered into splinters 14 feet down) to the Zebra (27 March 1838, main-topgallant and topmast shivered; fell on the deck; main-cap split; the jib and sails on mainmast scorched). Additionally, he cataloged the deaths of nearly 100 seamen and serious injury of about 250 others. During one particularly bad period of five or six years, Harris learned, lightning destroyed 40 ships of the line, 20 frigates, and 10 sloops, disabling about one-eighth of the British navy. Rodney. Sensing an opportunity to make a public case for his system, Harris bypassed the admiralty and petitioned the House of Commons to review his claims. A Naval Commission appointed to do that wound up firmly supporting Harris. if they petitioned the admiralty. Given how openly hostile the admiralty was toward Harris, I’m guessing many captains didn’t do that. A Lightning Rod for Every British Warship Finally, in June 1842, the admiralty ordered the use of Harris’s lightning rods on all Royal Navy vessels. According to Theodore Bernstein and Terry S. Reynolds, who chronicled Harris’s battle in their 1978 article “Protecting the Royal Navy from Lightning: William Snow Harris and His Struggle with the British Admiralty for Fixed Lightning Conductors” in IEEE Transactions on Education, the navy’s change of heart wasn’t due to better data or more appeals by Harris and his backers. It mostly came down to politics. A second argument was financial. Harris’s system was significantly more expensive than a simple cable or chain. In one 1831 estimate, the cost of Harris’s system ranged from £102 for a 10-gun brig to £365 for a 120-gun brig, compared to less than £5 for the simple cable. Sure, Harris’s system was effective, but was it more than 20 times as effective? Of course, the simple cable offered no protection at all if it was never deployed, as many captains admitted to. John Barrow (1764–1848), second secretary to the Royal Navy Admiralty, was singularly effective at blocking the adoption of Harris’s lightning rod. National Portrait Gallery But the ultimate reason for the navy’s resistance, argued Bernstein and Reynolds, was political. In 1830, when Harris seemed on the verge of success, the Whigs gained control of Parliament. In the course of a few months, many of Harris’s government supporters found themselves powerless or outright fired. It wasn’t until late 1841, when the Tories regained power, that Harris’s fortunes reversed. John Barrow, second secretary to the admiralty, as the key person standing in Harris’s way. Political appointees came and went, but Barrow held his office for over 40 years, from 1804 to 1845. Barrow managed the navy’s budget, and he apparently considered Harris a charlatan who was trying to sell the navy an expensive and useless technology. He used his position to continually block it. One navy supporter of Harris’s system called Barrow “the most obstinate man living.” Harris eventually proved victorious. By 1850, every vessel in the Royal Navy was equipped with his lightning rod. But the victory was fleeting. By the start of the next decade, the first British ironclad ship had appeared, and by the end of the century, all new naval ships were made of metal. Metal ships naturally conduct lightning to the surrounding water. There was no longer a need for a lightning rod. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the March 2025 print issue as “The Path of Most Resistance.” References Finch Collins, assistant curator of rare books at the Linda Hall Library, in Kansas City, Mo., introduced me to the books of William Snow Harris. You should have seen his face when I asked if we could apply a battery to one of the lightning experiments in the book. You can see the books in person by visiting the library. Or you can enjoy fully scanned copies of Observations on the Effects of Lightning on Floating Bodies and Three Experimental Illustrations from your computer. Theodore Bernstein of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Terry S. Reynolds of Michigan Technological University wrote “Protecting the Royal Navy from Lightning—William Snow Harris and His Struggle with the British Admiralty for Fixed Lightning Conductors” for the February 1978 issue of IEEE Transactions on Education. Many thanks to my colleague Cary Mock, a climatologist at the University of South Carolina who has an interest in extreme weather events throughout history. He has done amazing work re-creating paths of hurricanes based on navy logbooks. Cary patiently answered my questions about lightning and wooden ships and pointed me to additional resources, such as this fabulous “Index of 19th Century Naval Vessels.”